STOP

Ode To Billy Joe

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day.
I was out chopping cotton and my brother was baling hay.
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat.
And Mama hollered out the back door "y'all remember to wipe your feet,"
And then she said "I got some news this morning from Choctaw Ridge,"
"Today, Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge."

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the black-eyed peas:
"Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense; pass the biscuits, please."
"There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow."
And Mama said it was a shame about Billy Joe, anyhow.
Seems like nothing ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge.
And now Billy Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

And brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe,
Had put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show.
And wasn't I talking to him after church last Sunday night?
"I'll have another piece of apple pie; you know it don't seem right.
"I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge,
"And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge."

And Mama said to me: "Child, what's happened to your appetite?
"I've been cooking all morning and you haven't touched a single bite.
"That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today.
"Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way.
"He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge.
"And she and Billy Joe was throwing something off the Tallahatchie Bridge."

A year has come and gone since we heard the news 'bout Billy Joe,
And brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo.
There was a virus going 'round, Papa caught it and he died last Spring.
And now Mama doesn't seem to wanna do much of anything.
And me, I spend a lot of time picking flowers up on Choctaw Ridge.
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Written by Bobbie Gentry.
(© Northridge Music Company / Universal MCA Publishing.)
From "Ode To Billy Joe", © 1967, Capitol.

memed for pt.

Letter to the Editor by Sharon Underwood, Sunday, April 30, 2000 from the Valley News (White River Junction, VT/Hanover, NH)

As the mother of a gay son, I've seen firsthand how cruel and misguided people can be. Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high
school because he was perceived to be gay.

He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6. In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that he couldn't face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay, but I do know that God
didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it's about time you started doing that.

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that's not the case, then why would you suggest
that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are
speaking for "true Vermonters."

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give their lives so that the "homosexual agenda" could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.

How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.

The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks: "What ever happened to the idea of striving...to be better human beings than we are?"

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

Poets bad people, inadequate
boring to boot, gerunds and commas
never carry spit, soul, lemon seed
too delicate for brooding Senyoor Maas.

What is the origin of "to boot" as finale as well?
Headache, time leak, damp. Discomfort the anticatalyst but hardly .mov of shattering window played backwards.

oyu.

Foxes on the Cape last night. Ocean dark at 2 a.m. Drive-time.


The God of Inattention

After the trumpets, after the incense
There were nights insomnia fathered gods
I then rejected as too angry or distracted,
Or whose appetite for submission revealed
Their own lack of faith. Say our names,
All synonyms for trust. Others spoke
In sugared paradox: To know is to know
All. To not know all is not to know. To know
All requires that you know very little,
But to know that little you have to know
All. And for a while, it's true,
I burned in the dark fires of ambivalence,
My attention consumed like oxygen.
I'd wake up tired, as I had with the married man
Whose strictures and caprice begat,
And begat, and begat, and begat
My love for him, harvesting the same
Silence from my bed. Who listens
To my penitential tune? Who accepts
My petitions for convenient parking,
For spring, for the self illuminated
Across a kitchen table, for . . . for
Fortitude? I've heard a voice, I'm sure,
Advising me to drop this sentimental farce.
Only to hold the smoke of their names
Again in my mouth I'd resurrect
The dead, or adopt the gods orphaned
By atheists, except the gods they've made
From disbelief no one's faith could tolerate.
Refusing to make the same mistake
Just once, I've cried out to the dark
Many names, most given up as routinely
As the secrets of friends. If you're a cup
Will my lips profane your own? If a comb
Will I feel your teeth against my neck?
If a wall I will be darker than your shadow.
And if a door I will unlatch you, letting in
All the little foxes from the vineyard.

-- Averill Curdy